Chinese cuisine has a tremendous range of flavors and styles. The basic cooking methods include stir frying, stewing, deep frying, boiling, steaming, pan frying, roasting braise, and so on. The essence of cuisine is the mixture and heating of the ingredients, thus a variety of dishes can be made by changing the ingredients and heating intensity. However, up to now, cooking involves a lot of manual labor and relies very much on the cook's experience and skills.
There exists some automated cooking machines; however, they normally cannot realize an automation process from feeding raw material to a wok till pouring the cooked food out of the wok. More particularly, existing automated cooking machines cannot automatically add seasonings into the wok. As a consequence, human intervention is still required during the cooking process, which means the automation degree of the existing cooking machines is yet to be improved. In addition, in order to add a seasoning into the wok, an operator has to lift the wok lid prior to the adding of the seasoning when using the existing cooking machines, in which case, heat loss from the wok is inevitable.